


Childhood Innocence

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Feels, Fluff, Gen, I nearly gave this a very misleading tag, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-18 01:25:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16107887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Sherry's childhood wasn't uniformly horrible. She does have some good memories, more than some actually. The problem is, who can she share them with?





	Childhood Innocence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



The hardest part for Sherry wasn’t that she didn’t have any good memories from her childhood. To the contrary, she had plenty of them. Too many of them.

There was the time when she turned fifteen and Derek had taken her to McDonald’s for her birthday. She was much too old for that sort of thing, but he hadn’t known anything about teenage girls or children in general and it had been the only thing he could think of. A reward for good behavior probably, and maybe an attempt to manipulate her in some way, but she remembered him, in his suit, serious as ever staring at the menu behind the counter as though making a life or death decision. They’d eaten in silence and when they were done, instead of taking her back to the labs he had taken her to a book store and let her pick out as many as she wanted.

Wordlessly they’d carried not one, but five bags of books back to the car. She had no clue if she’d like any of them, but it had been the chance to get something to help her pass the time. Reading was better than sitting around and waiting and outings like that didn’t happen often.

Then he’d surprised her by offering to take her to an ice cream parlor.

She’d gotten the largest sundae on the menu and he’d ordered a small cone of soft serve vanilla with rainbow sprinkles.

No prompting from her, he’d just asked for the sprinkles.

It was a thought that came to her at the most random times. The man responsible for the assassination of President Benford, a terrorist attack on American soil, the creation of the C-virus, and more horrific things that were brought to light with each passing year, liked rainbow sprinkles on his ice cream.

Little human details that made it so hard to reconcile all the times he’d actually tried to treat her well with everything he’d done.

There was no way for her to tell anyone about things like that, the good things.

That wasn’t her worst secret though.

Back before that, before everything went wrong, her parents had tried so hard to be good.

And they were good, to her at least.

They took separate shifts, made sure that one of them would always be there for her birthday, called her when they couldn’t be home for her.

She remembered her mom helping her with math homework, saying that it was stupid that they weren’t allowed to use calculators because in the next few years everything would be done on computers and it was important to know how to put in the right formula.

“How will you kids be able to do real math,” her mother had wondered, “When your teachers don’t want you to practice entering formulas correctly?”

And it was her dad who’d worked out the trick of bedtime stories. Something that became such a routine for both of them that it continued right up to the end.

It was simple really, any book they wanted to read together he’d get two copies of. One that he’d leave at home with her and one that he took to work with him.

When it was time for her to go to bed he’d call home and she’d get her copy of the book and sit there, turning the pages while he read to her from his.

They went from picture books to chapter books that way.

It was towards then end when they were reading _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_. It was a favorite of hers because her parents were so secretive about what they worked on, constantly reassuring her that it was ‘only good things’ that they were doing and how paranoid Willy Wonka was let her imagine that her parents were involved in something similar. After all, Umbrella made everything so maybe…

One night the time came when her father usually called and she waited by the silent phone, holding the book open to the page where they’d left off the previous night.

When close to half an hour passed without the expected call, she picked up the phone and dialed the number her father had given her to contact him at work.

“Only for emergencies and important things,” he’d cautioned her, while at the same time making it clear that bedtime stories were important.

It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d called him to remind him.

This time was different though, the phone rang and rang.

Maybe her father was out of his office, working in one of the labs?

She hung up and tried again five minutes later, this time deciding that she would stay on until someone heard the ringing and picked up so she could at least ask where her father was.

Her plan worked.

After a very long time of fruitless ringing someone picked up. A man’s voice she thought that she might have recognized as one of her father’s coworkers.

“Yes?” They’d snapped, making the one word a demand.

She’d stammered something, she couldn’t remember exactly what, about wondering where her father was.

“In the labs,” was the terse response.

Then they hung up.

Something about how angry they’d sounded frightened her. She was sure that somehow she’d gotten her father in trouble. That, even though she hadn’t mentioned why she’d called, they’d find out about the bedtime stories and she knew that her father wasn’t supposed to be reading to her like that.

She was in bed when the phone rang.

Her mother answered it, wondering who was calling so late.

Sherry remembered that her mother had sounded worried, which in turn made her worried. She was sure that it was about her phone call.

From her room she could hear half of the call, starting with her mother’s terrified “What happened?”

Her father was in trouble, she was sure of it. He might even lose his job because of her.

“What do you want?”

The answer came quickly, for next her mother wanted to know “Why?”

She’d never heard her mother sound so afraid.

“What?”

Fear was gone, replaced by confusion.

“If you…” her mother trailed off, letting out a tired laugh, “Sherry, come in here. It’s your bedtime story.”

The voice on the other end wasn’t her father. It was the man who’d answered the phone earlier.

“William is in one of the labs,” they explained, “It will take too much time for him to go through the decontamination process. I know how easily distracted he is and I can’t have him distracted on this project so I’m doing this for him. You’re on chapter seventeen?”

Sherry opened to the dog-eared page, “Yes.”

“One chapter,” the voice on the other end said direly.

That was how it always was, disappointing when the chapters were short or ended on a cliff-hanger, but they’d stuck to it since starting chapter books, so Sherry wasn’t going to argue.

“ _When Mr Wonka turned round and saw what Augustus Gloop was doing, he cried out, ‘Oh, no!_ Please _, Augustus_ please _! I beg of you not to do that. My chocolate must be untouched by human hands!’_ ” the voice on the other end of the phone began.

Their tone was stilted and there were several points were they stopped for long enough that she worried that they’d hung up, but they finished the chapter. Immediately afterwards they hung up without another word.

It was something that her parents laughed about the next day, but didn’t explain to her and in the events that followed it was something that she forgot about entirely until one day, years later, after Derek, after everything.

When she was finally free.

A television on in the background, somewhere, she couldn’t remember where, or why the television was on. Just that it was playing a news station, something about bioterrorism, or Umbrella, or something. A clip of some old footage from some Umbrella event, before Raccoon City was wiped off the map, was being played. A man was speaking, saying things that only in hindsight, given context by what had happened, became menacing.

She recognized the voice instantly, though it took her a moment to place it as the mystery man who’d read to her all those years ago.

Someone changed the channel, but her mind was already spinning, trying and failing to imagine the conversation that must have taken place after her phone call all those years ago.

Albert Wesker had read a bedtime story to her because of something her father had said to him.

**Author's Note:**

> I was tempted to tag this as a treat, but given the nature of Sherry's childhood and the implications, it didn't feel right.


End file.
